


Not My Happy Ending

by Flyting



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, During Regina's First Dark Curse, Fluff, M/M, Mentions of OUAT characters, Silly, Storybrooke AU, Techie and Matt in Storybrooke, Techienician, kylux au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 14:55:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11292990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flyting/pseuds/Flyting
Summary: When the Dark Curse was enacted, it didn't just swallow the Enchanted Forest.28 years later, Techie lives in Storybrooke with his best friend Matt. He has a cat and an apartment and a job that he hates, but things could be worse. They really could.





	Not My Happy Ending

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a tumblr prompt.

His alarm goes off at 7am every morning.

If he waits long enough, trying to ignore the blaring with his head under a pile of blankets and cheap dime-store throw pillows, it will eventually stop on its own. He will let his gummy eyes slip shut, again, scratching himself idly under the covers, and try to adjust his cramping body so that a different part of him is hanging off of the too-small foldout bed.

Every morning he says he’s going to get up with the first alarm. Actually make himself some breakfast, do the dishes before they grew legs and crawled away, maybe even shave and wash his hair and try to look fucking presentable before work. He never does.

The alarm will go off again eventually, and he will root around below with one arm, blindly, until he finds the button to turn it off before it wakes up his roommate. His feet rustle in the discarded papers and other detritus on the floor around the bed as he trudges out, yawning and clumsy, for coffee. LED lights blink sleepily at him from around the room. Servers that he’s working on in his spare time, dismantled motherboards, old electronics. One of his four or five old laptops is in sleep mode, colors dancing across the screen, and he’s briefly jealous.

Every morning he starts the coffee and realizes that somehow it’s later than he thought. Then it’s scrambling, pounding on Matt’s door to wake him up, scrubbing his face and anything else that shows with a damp cloth in their dingy shared bath, doing the sniff test on the pile of laundry on his bedroom floor- the one he keeps meaning to fold and put away properly one day. His hair’s a lost cause, tangled and oily, betraying the fact that he just rolled out of bed, but it usually is and nobody ever comments on it. They would probably be more surprised if he came in looking neat and polished.

“Matt, we’re- we’re going to be late!” he stammers when he’s nervous, always has. It doesn’t help that he’s always nervous. Matt doesn’t worry about being late and losing his job and not being able to pay the rent and getting kicked out of his crappy messy apartment, because his mother is their boss and even if he did something bad enough that she fired him, Matt’s got money somewhere and he’ll be okay.

Matt doesn’t worry about anything, so Techie worries about everything. It’s not a system that works well, but it’s the only system he has.

Matt emerges from the bathroom showered and smiling, with his glasses fogged and his curly hair still damp. He’d bleached it over the summer on impulse, but then he’d decided it made him look like a ‘giant cabbage patch doll’. He wasn’t mad, exactly. Matt was never mad about anything, which was probably a useful trait to have when you did as much stupid stuff on impulse as Matt did. But now he was waiting for it to grow back out to black and it was taking forever, stuck in an awful in-between stage, not quite black, not quite blonde.

Matt stuffs a muffin in his overlarge mouth as Techie practically drags him out the door, and if they hurry and there isn’t much traffic, then maybe just this once they might make it to work by 9:04- late, but not too late that Techie can’t slip in the door and avoid Leia’s gaze until after lunch.

He’s lucky in the fact that there’s never much traffic. They get through the town square without much trouble, passing the boarded up library and the broken clocktower that never seemed to get fixed, like everything else in Storybrooke. They pass Mr. Gold’s shop and Techie tells Matt to remind him to pay the rent when they get off work, even though he knows that Matt will forget, and then Techie will forget, and the rent will be due before he remembers, so that he would have to be the one to scramble for the cash before their terrifying landlord arrived to collect it.

“He’s not that bad,” Matt would say. “I’m sure he’s a reasonable guy if you got to know him.” Of course he would say that. Matt liked everyone. If you wanted a list of Matt’s friends you just grabbed a phone book.

“Right. I’m reasonably sure he’d only- only break one of my legs.”

They are about to pull into the parking lot at New Republic, only slightly late for once, and that is when Matt sees the cat.

The skinny orange tabby is picking through the garbage can next to the building and Techie knows before he even sees the look in Matt’s eyes.

“No- no, come on. We’re already late and your mother’s going to yell at me, and-.”

“But look, she’s so skinny.”

“No, what are you even going to do?”

“Maybe we can catch her and take her to the shelter.”

“But we don’t have time,” Techie whines.

“It’ll take two seconds, the shelter is just back there on Main street. I’m just gonna grab her in your jacket and we’ll take her right over. Please, Techie? “ And he’s never been good at standing up for himself, but he especially cannot resist when Matt looks at him with those big, soft eyes.

Techie gives up his windbreaker, leaving just the threadbare yellow t-shit that he kept meaning to throw out, but somehow never managed. He needed new clothes, he always forgot.

In the end ‘two seconds’ spins out into half an hour of Matt chasing the skinny but surprisingly agile stray cat around the alley, occasionally calling for Techie to, ‘just chase her over this way- no, left!’, but he is beaming, all gap-toothed happiness when he finally manages to throw the windbreaker over her and wrap her up in it.

“What if I get rabies?” Techie frets, as they walk to the pet shelter, gingerly pressing at the shallow claw marks on his arm.

“You’re not going to get rabies. She’s such a sweet girl, she would never give you rabies,” he says in the baby voice people use for talking to cute animals, “Listen, she’s purring!”

It was true. Wrapped up in Techie’s now filthy jacket, the cat was happily purring in Matt’s arms as they walk.

They hand the cat over to the lady at the shelter and make it to work at 9:47.

As usual.

~

Life goes on. Nobody claims the cat, and Techie is helpless to stop Matt from bringing it home to their apartment, despite his best arguments that they don’t have room and he thinks he might be allergic to cats and anyway it tried to give him rabies. Matt names her Millicent.

~

“Yes, mommy,” Techie can just make out the rumble of Matt’s voice from the other side of their office wall. “Okay, mommy.... yes.... okay... yes, mommy.”

Matt will be thirty years old in August and he still calls his mother ‘mommy’, in the small, childish tone of a little boy. Techie is the first roommate he’s ever had. He’d never lived on his own before they moved in together two years ago.

Techie pays the rent and the electricity and does the grocery shopping, not because he wants to but because if he doesn’t then Matt just won’t and then where would they be?

In return, Matt does the dishes (sometimes) and reminds Techie to go to bed at a decent hour and is also probably the only reason Techie hasn’t been fired from his job as IT support at New Republic Industries.

Not that he likes his job- he hates his job. He spends eight hours a day being ordered around and dismissed and insulted. When things work right, people ask, “Why do we even need you?” and when they don’t work, its, “What do they even pay you for?”

He hates New Republic. He’s... he isn’t even really sure what they do, to be honest, which some disused little part of his mind knows is odd, though he can never quite put his finger on why. Whatever they do, it’s something he vaguely disapproves of- he knows that much.

But what can he do? It pays the bills. If he didn’t work here he’d have to go back to working for his father’s day care, and he’s never been good with children. Between his IT job and Matt’s work as an office boy-slash-general lackey for his mother, they just about make due.

So he gets up in the morning, and he goes to work at nine, or as close to nine as he can manage with Matt in tow. They go home at 5:30, the same route every time, and eat cheap takeout and pet the cat, and sometimes he remembers to do the dishes before they grow legs and crawl away. Then they go to bed and do the whole thing again the next day.

~

“Do you ever have weird dreams?” Matt asks one morning on their daily carpool as they pass through the town square and Techie is thinking that that he needs to tell Matt to remind him to pay Mr. Gold when they get out of work.

“Dreams? Like what?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe ones that feel like.... like remembering something you forgot.”

“I had a dream I forgot to feed Millie and she started eating my toes once.”

“Not like that,” Matt says. There’s something somber and pensive in his tone that isn’t usually there. “Like there’s some important, something really important you’re supposed to be doing, and you only remember it in your dreams.”

Techie always feels like there’s something important he’s supposed to be doing. That was how anxiety worked. “Maybe you slept wrong?” he offers.

“Yeah, maybe,” Matt says, running a hand through his messy curls. He had dyed them last summer and was waiting for the color to grow out. It was taking forever.

~~

They on their way home from work. It’s been a few days, or maybe a few weeks since the dream conversation.

Maybe it had happened more than once.

Matt is driving and Techie is making a grocery list in his head for later when he sees the blonde woman in the red jacket storm across the road right ahead, completely ignoring their oncoming car.

“Stop! Stop!” Techie yelps suddenly, and Matt wrenches the wheel and slams on the breaks, sending them both jerking against their seatbelts. The breaks squeal. There’s little bump and a crash.

“Status report!”

“Huh?” Matt asks, dazed, adjusting his glasses.

“What?” Techie echoes. What did- why did he say that? He shakes his head. “We didn’t hit her, did we?”

As soon as he says it, he catches a flash of red and blonde across the street as the woman throws open the door to Mr. Gold’s shop. A wave of relief washes through him.

“Just the curb, I think,” Matt says. He has his head stuck out the window. There’s an awful grinding sound as he throws the car into reverse and they pull carefully back onto the road. Techie grits his teeth. Once they’re back on asphalt the grinding stops. “It sounds okay, don’t you think?”

“Like either of us know,” Techie says, nerves making him waspish, although if they had messed up the suspension they might not be able to tell right away, not unless the car started to pull on the turn. Or there could be a puncture in the brake lines, or a damaged-

How did he know that? He must have read it somewhere.

Techie rubs a hand over his eyes, “Lets- lets just go home.”

~~

Matt is in the kitchen washing the dishes, humming to himself, and Techie is on the couch with Millie warm and sleepy on his lap when awareness hits him like a wave.

The humming stops.

His hands tremble, as if from exhaustion, but he isn’t tired- not tired, he is more awake than he has been in years. He stands, dumping the cat onto the floor, brushing a hand through his own long, lank hair as if aware of it for the first time.

How- Where?

A shadow appears in the kitchen doorway, big enough to blot out the light.

“General,” Matt- Kylo says.

Hux’s shoulders creak a little with disuse as he holds himself straight-backed for the first time in twenty-eight years. He tilts his head from side to side, loosening the muscles in his neck. The cat has abandoned him to twine around Kylo’s legs, needy, in the way she does to Matt when she wants to be fed. Kylo nudges the animal away with his foot, less than gently.

“Were you responsible for this?” Kylo asks, low and threatening, indicating with his chin the messy domestic scene around them. He removes Matt's glasses with one hand, tossing them carelessly on the floor.

Hux remembers weak little Matt, with his easy smile and soft heart, “I had assumed it was your doing,” he swallows. “Things like this are more your domain than mine.”

“It wasn’t me,” he answers.

“Who, then? If not the Force, then what had the power to do this?”

Kylo’s jaw works. His fist clenches, as if recalling the feel of his lightsaber. “Let’s go find out.”


End file.
